Inside Anduril, Palmer Luckey's Bid to Build a Border Wall | We’re standing on the edge of a cliff on a remote Texas ranch, a long patch of rocky desert stretching out below to the verdant banks of the Rio Grande, a… | https://ift.tt/2kYMLk2 | via Instapaper and IFTTT

Palmer Luckey—yes, that Palmer Luckey, the 25-year-old entrepreneur who founded the virtual reality company Oculus, sold it to Facebook, and then left Facebook in a haze of political controversy—hands me a Samsung Gear VR headset. Slipping it over my eyes, I am instantly immersed in a digital world that simulates the exact view I had just been enjoying in real life. In the virtual valley below is a glowing green square with text that reads PERSON 98%. Luckey directs me to tilt my head downward, toward the box, and suddenly an image pops up over the VR rendering. A human is making his way through the rugged sagebrush, a scene captured by cameras on a tower behind me. To his right I see another green box, this one labeled ANIMAL 86%. Zooming in on it brings up a photo of a calf, grazing a bit outside its usual range. The system I’m trying out is Luckey’s solution to how the US should detect unauthorized border crossings. It merges VR with surveillance tools to create a digital wall that is not a barrier so much as a web of all-seeing eyes, with intelligence to know what it sees. Luckey’s company, Anduril Industries, is pitching its technology to the Department of Homeland Security as a complement to—or substitute for—much of President Trump’s promised physical wall along the border with Mexico. It promises a system that would cost a small fraction of a physical wall and is cheaper than its digital competitors. In a steampunkish workshop in an industrial area of Oakland, California, Anduril houses a project called Sentry. Sentry is a fleet of autonomous firefighting machines meant to battle blazes on California’s hills, among other applications. The idea is to hollow out armored troop carriers to hold more than a thousand gallons of water. With crinkled aluminum skin, a Sentry vehicle looks something like a battlebot tank.
wired, 11.06.2018

What they didn’t find in affordable parts was a way to capture distant moving objects at night. Thermal cameras cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and fare poorly in the wind and dirt of the Texas border. But Luckey had an idea: Sync a laser beam to a virtual shutter, similar to flash photography. “We shoot a flash beam way, way, way out to where you are,” Luckey says. “It lights up you and the area around you, and then we’re able to pick that up with our electro-­optical sensor.” Anduril discovered it could cheaply repurpose the laser, which it bought in bulk, originally meant for a 600-watt cosmetic hair-removal device.
...
I leave the Oakland workshop pumped from the excitement of saving the homes of imaginary Californians. But as I steer my car through the battered chain-link gate, past graffiti-covered buildings, the lingering adrenaline from my digital immersion turns to a funny aftertaste. The California fires last summer were devastatingly real. So is warfare. Anduril is on a quest to build awesome tech, the stuff of comics and action films. But it will be deployed in situations of human desperation, a vast remove from the land of fun. Transforming consumer tech’s plowshares into swords is ultimately a dark pursuit.

It struck me after I’d wrapped up my visits with Anduril that, aside from the drug smugglers they helped intercept on the border, I had not heard the founders mention the people who might get caught in their omniscient zone. What is the right way to treat those individuals? What of the children and parents who are now being torn apart while crossing? Those are social and political questions, not technical specifications. But it is increasingly the case that the people who build new technologies trigger political consequences.

Palmer Luckey—yes, that Palmer Luckey, the 25-year-old entrepreneur who founded the virtual reality company Oculus, sold it to Facebook, and then left Facebook in a haze of political controversy—hands me a Samsung Gear VR headset. via Pocket

It struck me after I’d wrapped up my visits with Anduril that, aside from the drug smugglers they helped intercept on the border, I had not heard the founders mention the people who might get caught in their omniscient zone. What is the right way to treat those individuals? What of the children and parents who are now being torn apart while crossing? Those are social and political questions, not technical specifications. But it is increasingly the case that the people who build new technologies trigger political consequences.

Palmer Luckey—yes, that Palmer Luckey, the 25-year-old entrepreneur who founded the virtual reality company Oculus, sold it to Facebook, and then left Facebook in a haze of political controversy—hands me a Samsung Gear VR headset. via Pocket

Palmer Luckey—yes, that Palmer Luckey, the 25-year-old entrepreneur who founded the virtual reality company Oculus, sold it to Facebook, and then left Facebook in a haze of political controversy—hands me a Samsung Gear VR headset.